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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506006">and again</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepyMaddy/pseuds/SleepyMaddy'>SleepyMaddy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dimension Cannon, Dimension-Hopping Rose Tyler, Gen, not that many though, other characters make an appearance but theyre not central, references to the dimension cannon big finish audios, yes i know its been years What About It</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:34:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,444</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506006</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepyMaddy/pseuds/SleepyMaddy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>at first, they think it's bad luck. </p>
<p>and then it keeps happening.</p>
<p>and again.</p>
<p>and again.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Or: a look at Rose Tyler as she crosses apocalyptic parallel after apocalyptic parallel</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>and again</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this has been in my drafts for a long time and in my head ever since i listened to the dimension cannon big finish audios. Speaking of which, i cannot recommend them enough if You Too miss rose tyler an unhealthy amount</p>
<p>no need to have listened to the audios to follow the fic though! however, the first vignette does tackle the first audio, so consider skipping it if you don’t want spoilers. other than that, there’s just a few scattered references</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first jump is like breathing after staying underwater too long. </p>
<p>It’s not that she thinks she’ll get it right first go round –or maybe she does, just a little bit, but when that’s proven wrong, she’s not too torn up about it. It’s that she can finally do <em> something</em>. After months and months of dead ends, this is <em> working</em>, and she’s finally moving. She finds Clive, she finds her dad, she finds her mum, and, sure, this isn’t the right universe, but it’s a start. She’s found out where the story diverged, and the people back at Torchwood on Pete’s World will be able to use that, and the next jump will be that much closer and this might actually <em> work </em> and–</p>
<p>And the sun switches off.</p>
<p>It’s night, so it’s a bit anticlimactic, but the truth of the matter remains. The sun switches off –it’s gone, like a cheap lightbulb blowing out. This Earth is dying, fast. </p>
<p>Everything kinda spirals, after that. Pete, <em> this </em> world’s Pete, tries to get her to take them with her. The <em> other </em> Pete keeps saying how impossible it is, repeating things like <em> dimensional collapse </em> and <em> there’s no way</em>, but he doesn’t <em> see </em> it. He doesn’t see them, her parents –they’re not, of course they’re not, but they still are–, Clive, an entire Earth with no tomorrow. Nothing but the cold, and the dark.</p>
<p>Rose has seen a lot, over her time with the Doctor. She likes to think she’s learnt from him, too. She’s always tried to help, all her life, but now she’s better at it, she <em> knows </em> how to do it, except…. It’s all useless, here. She might as well be 19 years old all over again; she never learnt how to cope with a <em> sun </em> going out. Maybe the Doctor’d know what to do, but he’s not <em> here</em>, that’s the whole bloody point of these jumps. </p>
<p>She can’t fix this. She can’t save them. </p>
<p>This world’s Pete panics, and how can she blame him? He steals her travel disk, threatens that it’s all four of them jumping back, or no one at all. It doesn’t really sound like something her dad would do, but then again, he isn’t her dad, and, well, even if he was, she’s never seen him faced with the world <em> ending </em> around him.</p>
<p>And then this world’s Jackie fixes it. Gets her her travel disk back, and tells her to go back home and stay safe, and now that <em> does </em> sound like her mother, and it makes it so much worse. </p>
<p>She can’t bear to save no one, so she takes Clive. It’s a risk, an insane one. She doesn’t realize just how lucky she is that it works until days later, when she wakes up in a panic about it in the middle of the night.</p>
<p>But it does work. Her and Clive wake up in the cannon room at Torchwood, medics swarm them and take care of his leg, and Rose can barely hear the panic-fueled telling off Pete is giving her under the sheer <em> relief </em> she feels at seeing the sunlight stream through the windows. </p>
<p><em> We made it</em>, she thinks with a grin. </p>
<p><em> They didn’t</em>, she remembers, guilt overwhelming and crushing.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In hindsight, she thinks she didn’t really appreciate it enough, saving Clive –getting to save someone. She was <em> glad</em>, of course, but she didn’t know, back then.</p>
<p>She didn’t know just how <em> rare </em> saving someone, anyone, would become.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The jumps are suspended for a little while, and it takes her every single bit of patience she has to not start up a storm at Torchwood. She tries to see it from Pete’s point of view, from her mum’s: her <em> first </em> jump, the first universe they ended up in, out of the potentially infinite parallels there are, turned out to be to an Earth just one day away from complete annihilation. Sure, it might be sheer bad luck, but there’s also a chance the engineers somehow miscalibrated the cannon. </p>
<p>And so, she sits back while Clive’s leg heals, and hovers in the labs where Tosh and her team are working tirelessly to understand just how the cannon works –observing and asking questions and studying until their patience runs out and they kick her out. </p>
<p>Eventually, once Clive is up and about again, and the scientists are backed into the metaphorical corner, she gets Pete to relent: she’ll jump again. Clive will come with, now that they know two people can go through the gates the cannon creates. Pete isn’t <em> happy </em> about it, but he lets it happen, and he seems almost hopeful, too.</p>
<p>And then on their first jump, they arrive on an empty, barren wasteland. Ruins and rubble, dry and ashy under a sun that’s just a little bit too red. She’s about to tell Pete that the spatial shift has gotten a <em> lot </em> worse when Clive points out that the massive hunk of twisted metal in the distance looks an awful lot like the London Eye. </p>
<p>They put it down to bad luck, and jump again. This time, there’s fog, a grey, chemical smelling fog so thick Rose barely manages to tell Pete to reactivate the jump and pull them back.</p>
<p>And then it keeps happening. </p>
<p>And again.</p>
<p>And again.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Their first non-apocalyptic universe ends up being attempt number 14 –just one away from Pete’s “15 trials max” limit. She uses it to convince Pete to let the jumps continue, and hopes he can’t tell that it was almost worse –that she spent the whole time there just <em> waiting </em> for a catastrophe to happen. That he can’t tell that every time the cannon powers up, a part of her almost <em> hopes </em> she’ll land somewhere whatever catastrophe must happen has already taken place.</p>
<p>At least then, when the Earth they land on is already dying, she knows what she’s dealing with. </p>
<p>*</p>
<p>But sometimes, just sometimes, everything goes fine. They don’t find the Doctor, see no signs of aliens, or UNIT, or anything that might give them a clue, but at least the world doesn’t <em> end</em>, and doesn’t that tell you something about how low the bar has dropped. </p>
<p>It’s been a slow week –a thread of jumps to normal worlds, remarkable only by the Doctor’s absence. No sun going out, no endless rain, no terrifying technology using the soul of dead people –Pete made her promise not to tell her mum about that particular alternate business endeavour–, no ruins, just... Earth. She’s jumping alone today, and it takes her remarkably little time to figure out that this universe has no Tylers, no Smiths, no Clive. She doesn’t know if it’s because this universe is just similar enough that it’s easy to find her way around, or if it’s because she’s getting better at this. </p>
<p>The universes they’re not in are both better and worse. Worse, because it makes it harder to find anything about the Doctor, but better, because if some kind of cataclysm ends up striking, at least she’s not letting her family die all over again. </p>
<p>See? Low, <em> low</em>, bar.</p>
<p>She has a few hours, so she wanders, taking notes of the obvious differences –traffic lights are on a frankly alarming orange to purple colour scheme, cars drive on the other side of the road–, and eventually, she ends up on a rooftop terrace somewhere in the South of the city, surrounded with strangers. </p>
<p>Night’s fallen, and it must be winter, because the cold bites through her sweater, but she pushes through. She smiles and laughs at the jokes she hears in passing, and, for a minute, lets herself be one of them, just another Londoner on a Friday night. She’ll have to go soon –Pete’s told her she has an hour left on the clock, but that was a while ago–, but it’s nice, letting go of the weight she carries, every now and then. It’s pretend, and it doesn’t fix the problems, but it’s nice. It reminds her of travelling with the Doctor, in a way –pretending to belong, looking like you belong, even though you’re from so far away you might as well be from a different universe.</p>
<p>She’s lost in thought, and she doesn’t notice the argument happening next to her until someone jumps to their feet. The person is tall, about Rose’s age, and her long red hair spills out from underneath a dark blue beanie, flying in the cold breeze. A distinct Scottish tilt makes her words seem even more snappish. “How <em> thick </em> are you?”</p>
<p>“Amy,” a guy seated next to her says –it sounds tired, like he knows there’s very little point in even trying to stop her.</p>
<p>He’s right. She continues, pointing a finger at some other bloke seated across from them and completely ignoring the warning. “Not exactly an astrophysicist, are you? So how would you know?”</p>
<p>“Amy, come on,” her friend says, tugging on her sleeve. The woman’s –Amy’s– interlocutor only laughs dismissively as she glowers at them and, eventually, she sits back down, still glaring. “You know there’s no point,” her friend continues and she huffs, but doesn’t argue. “If they don’t want to see it, they won’t.”</p>
<p>“See what?” Rose asks, as casually as she can. Her time jumping has made her even better at inserting herself into conversations somewhat naturally, but it doesn’t always work.</p>
<p>Amy looks her up and down, eyes narrowing, but her friend replies, his voice friendly. “The stars.”</p>
<p>“What about the stars?”</p>
<p>They exchange a glance, before he speaks again. “Well, that’s why we’re here. They’ve… gone wrong, sort of. We noticed, well, Amy noticed, cause we’re from a smaller city, so you can really see them, and we came here to see if anyone was, I don’t know. Doing something about it.”</p>
<p>Rose has learnt to trust her instinct by now, and right now, it’s curling into a bitter taste of foreboding at the back of her throat. “What’s gone wrong with the stars?”</p>
<p>This time, Amy replies, her eyes wide and pleading, begging her to understand how important this is. “They’re going out.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The stars are, indeed, going out. </p>
<p>She doesn’t get to check in that particular universe, because her time runs out, but the following non-apocalyptic universes all concur: every night, there are less stars than the night before. It’s not a light pollution thing, it’s not an optical illusion –stars are just… switching off. </p>
<p>Most of the time, at first, most people don’t know about it. Or, if they do, they don’t believe it. It’s a fringe theory, something for conspiracy nutters to rant about, not something that’s taken seriously. But Rose gets better at finding the people who do believe it, and there’s always some scientists looking into it, trying to understand. And the consensus is always the same.</p>
<p>Something is happening to the universe. Something dark and terrible, and it’s destroying entire worlds and systems, and, mostly, it’s not stopping.</p>
<p>That’s when Rose realizes that even those universes she thought were safe, even those Earths she thought weren’t ending, are actually just on borrowed time. It’s not her luck, it’s not the cannon settings being off; <em> all </em> the universes are in danger.</p>
<p>Following that, she’s only half surprised when one day, Pete welcomes her from a jump with a grim expression and the news that five stars seem to have officially disappeared from their night sky.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The leather jacket is an impulse buy.</p>
<p>It’s been a long week. A difficult week. 8 jumps, 8 universes with no traces of the Doctor, 8 universes ending in flames. Usually, there’s a bit more variety than that, but for some reason, the thread the cannon engineers followed this week was all to do with fire: expanding solar flares and thinning ozone layers and hot, scorching smoke. She’d swear the smell of it is never going to wash out of her hair. </p>
<p>At least, there was no trace of the Tylers or the Smith or anyone she knew at all. It’s a small mercy, but she’ll take it all the same. Watching people face the end of their world is hard enough, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to it, but there’s something so personal about watching the people you love go through that same thing –no matter how many times you tell yourself that it’s not really them.</p>
<p>She’s walking home, angry and focused and heartbroken. Pete’s put his foot down for the rest of the week –demanded she take a couple of days off. The fact that they might not have that long wasn’t enough to convince him otherwise. </p>
<p>Deep down, she knows he means well –she knows they worry about her, all of them, and she knows they’re probably right, at least a little. But she <em> hates </em> staying still. When she jumps, she can focus on whatever horror she’s facing right then. When she’s still, she has to <em> remember </em> everything she’s seen, and right now, the memories of flames and inescapable, rising heat are making her skin feel raw and horribly thin, the faintest breeze like an open flame against it.</p>
<p>Something blue catches the corner of her eye. It’s been a few years now, and she’s stopped jumping out of her skin at the faintest wind that might sound like the TARDIS, but she’s never really managed to shake her reaction to that particular shade of blue. Her head turns reflexively, and she finds herself staring at a charity shop. The window’s a bit grimy, but the blue of the jacket is so vibrant it stands out anyway, from the end of a clothes rack. </p>
<p>She doesn’t realize she’s moved until she’s standing in front of it, inside the store. The leather is a bit worn, but it’s in great condition, and as she brushes a finger along a sleeve, memories flash by, unbidden. Ice blue eyes, a Northern tilt, and warm, comforting leather, worn like an armour as they stared at the ruins of planet Earth from a space station so far into the future. </p>
<p>She didn’t know, at the time, couldn’t have, why he took her there. Her first trip, and he chose to show her her own planet in molten ruins; who does that? She knows now, though, of course; he’d seen his own planet burn, and he wanted someone, anyone, to get a glimpse of what that felt like.</p>
<p>And she remembers it –she remembers it so well; the hollow, yet crushing weight of how <em> final </em> it was. The fact that none of it would ever come back, that it couldn’t be fixed, that there was nothing to be done. She remembers it, and worse, she’s now oh so familiar with it. It comes back, every single time. Every time she watches another universe, another earth spiral to its end, the feeling is back, squeezing her throat until breathing’s no longer an option. And every time, unlike on Platform Five, there’s no time machine to fix it –no one to hold her hand through it.</p>
<p>She takes a deep breath, ignores the taste of ashes in her mouth, and tries to picture it: the Doctor, watching the ruins of his home burn away to nothing. The Doctor, completely alone, with nothing but a leather jacket for defense.</p>
<p>Her hand clutches at the sleeve, soft leather folding underneath her fingers.</p>
<p>She gets the jacket.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Donna Noble. </p>
<p>The name crops up, over and over. If Rose was anyone else, she’d call it a coincidence, but she thought Bad Wolf was a coincidence too, and she’s not about to make that mistake twice. </p>
<p>It’s almost ironic. No matter where they go, they can’t seem to find a single trace of the Doctor, never, not even a glimpse of a blue box, but instead, always that name. Donna, Donna, Donna. Sometimes, it’s in passing –someone says it into a phone on a street corner, and before she can go after them, they’ve disappeared into the crowds. Sometimes it’s closer –they meet someone, and they know her; Rob and Pete Tyler work with her at the Agency; Jackie Prentice used to know her dad.  </p>
<p>It piles on and on, and, after a while, when looking for the Doctor directly starts feeling more like a waste of time, she talks Pete into letting her look into it. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, her jump time always runs out before she can meet her in person. </p>
<p>Sure, always coming up empty-handed about the Doctor is frustrating, but there’s something particularly annoying about never managing to find someone who’s so noticeably <em> there</em>. </p>
<p>*</p>
<p>One day, something goes wrong. She miscalculates, and the jump back to her universe gets botched. The flash of light goes up, she feels that familiar pull as she’s ripped away from the parallel she was on, but instead of the drop back on the floor of the cannon room at Torchwood, all she feels is––</p>
<p>Well. Nothing.</p>
<p>It’s overwhelming and underwhelming all at once, nothing at all pressing into her eyes and her ears and demanding to be felt but there’s <em> nothing</em>. She blinks against nothing, and breathes nothing, and a part of her that’s somehow still aware, somehow not turned to <em> nothing </em> yet knows what happened.</p>
<p>She’s in the Void.</p>
<p>Except––</p>
<p>Except she’s seen the Void before. She brushes past it with every jump, feels it grasp at her every time she goes from one parallel to another. It’s empty, but it pulls and crushes and condenses. </p>
<p>This? This is wrong. It’s flat, it’s empty in a way that’s completely, utterly <em> passive</em>. </p>
<p><em> It’s dead</em>, she thinks, suddenly, <em> the Void is dead, too</em>. </p>
<p>Her travel disk sparks in her hand, and she’s pulled away –and the Void should fight back, should make it impossible for her to get out, should grab her too strongly for her to jump away but… </p>
<p>It’s dead, and Rose Tyler lands on the cold floor of Torchwood in Pete’s World.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The day that changes everything, ironically, starts like any other day. She only realizes something is different when she makes it to the cannon room. Tosh, the lead scientist on the project, is there, animatedly discussing something with Pete, but they both fall silent when Rose walks in.</p>
<p>Everything is still for a few seconds, before she breaks the silence. “What is it?”</p>
<p>Tosh glances in Pete’s direction before pushing her glasses back up along the bridge of her nose. Her ponytail is messy, messier than usual, and she looks like she’s not slept in a while. “There’s something new.”</p>
<p>“It’s too risky–” Pete starts, and the concerned frown creasing his brow starts something like <em> hope </em> in Rose’s chest.</p>
<p>“It’s too late to worry about risky,” she counters, with a pointed look at the board monitoring the progress of the stars’ disappearance. There’s barely any left, she knows, the night sky turned into an almost blank, dark slate. </p>
<p>Tosh nods, handing her a tablet with something Rose has started to recognize as parallel data –all the variables that identify one parallel from another. “We were going to send you to this world, today,” she says, as Rose scans the variables. She doesn’t strictly know what each of them means, but she’s learnt what ranges of numbers are normal for each. Tosh swipes a finger over the screen, and the data changes. <em> Those </em> numbers she’s never seen before. “But then this… <em> happened</em>.”</p>
<p>“What d’you mean, happened?”</p>
<p>“I mean that this particular world wasn’t there yesterday. Looks like it just… appeared. And the data… We’ve never seen numbers like this. Whatever this world is, it’s something special.”</p>
<p>She’s not felt hope like this in weeks –maybe months. “Then what are we waiting for?”</p>
<p>Pete speaks then. “Rose… Those numbers are unique, but they also mean it might not be stable.” He swallows hard. “For all we know, this world could disappear as quickly as it appeared. And we don’t know what happens if you’re in it while it does.”</p>
<p>For one moment, the memory of the nothingness of the Void fills her vision. And then, she gets herself together. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.” </p>
<p>“Rose–” Pete starts, but she fixes him with a determined, unwavering look.</p>
<p>“It’s a risk we <em> have </em> to take.” The silence is deafening, but eventually, he nods once, and Rose turns back to Tosh. “Get the cannon ready.”</p>
<p>Deep down, she knows this is it. It’s too convenient, too exceptional to be a fluke. She doesn’t know how it’ll end, but she knows this is about to end all the same.</p>
<p>She zips her jacket shut and takes a deep breath. “Allons-y,” she mutters.</p>
<p>It’s time for it to end, anyway.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>me, writing dimension jumping Rose content in the year of our lord 2021? more likely than you think. </p>
<p>anyway, this was a delight to write because i missed my girl; let me know what you thought! </p>
<p>also, as evidenced by the above, i have Many Thoughts about Rose and everything she's been through, and i am always happy to chat so feel free to drop by on tumblr; i'm @taardisblue and also Very Sad About Rose Tyler, Always</p></blockquote></div></div>
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